Prealloyed Cu-Fe Powder Materials

Mechanical alloying (MA) is one of the most appropriate severe plastic deformation processes applied to powders in order to obtain good mixing, new different systems or alloys and / or to reduce particles grain size from the starting powders. In the present work, MA was used to obtain prealloyed powders of Cu-Fe base alloys suitable for subsequent sintering. Mechanical alloying process parameters have been optimised to reduce container and balls contamination in dry and inert atmosphere conditions. For safe final powder manipulation, the final aggregate size requirement needed to be kept in the microscopic scale. The microstructural results showed that the components of the original powders were intimately combined resulting in alloyed aggregates suitable for sintering and for mixing to other hard materials to obtain composites. The materials selection for container and balls is critical in order to avoid contamination. In the present work, no contamination was detected in the final processed particles. Consolidation of these powders was carried out as well as calorimetric tests for studying their stability.